Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 216
She then picked up a piece of paper and read from it as follows:
“The Pythagorean philosophers as well as Philolans and Hicetus of Syracuse conceived of space as immaterial. The Alexandrine geometers substituted a conception of rigid coordinates which has dominated all scientific thinking until our own day. I will now introduce Professor Droon who will address the members on Four Dimensional Space if the ladies near the doorway will kindly occupy the chairs which are still empty at the front.”
Professor Droon, rising behind the water jug, requested the audience in a low voice to dismiss from their minds all preconceived notions of the spatial content of the universe. When they had done this, he asked them in a whisper to disregard the familiar postulate in regard to parallel lines. Indeed, it would be far better, he murmured, if they dismissed all thought of lines as such and substituted the idea of motion through a series of loci conceived as instantaneous in time.
After this he drank half the water and started.
In the address which followed and which lasted for one hour and forty minutes, it was clear that the audience were held in rapt attention. They never removed their eyes from the lecturer’s face and remained soundless except that there was a certain amount of interested whispering each time he drank water.
When he mentioned that Euclid, the geometrician, was married four times there were distinct signs of amusement. There was a sigh of commiseration when he said that Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier just as he was solving a problem in mechanics. And when he mentioned the name of Christopher Columbus there was obvious and general satisfaction.
In fact, the audience followed the lecture word for word. And when at length the professor asked in a whisper whether we could any longer maintain the conception of a discrete universe absolute in time and drank the rest of the water and sat down, the audience knew that it was the end of the lecture and there was a distinct wave of applause.
The comments of the audience as they flowed out of the hall showed how interested they had been. I heard one lady remark that Professor Droon had what she would call a sympathetic face; another said, yes, except that his ears stuck out too far.
Another said that she had heard that he was a very difficult man to live with; and another said that she imagined that all scientists must be because she had a friend who knew a lady who had lived in the same house all one winter with the Marconis and very often Marconi wouldn’t eat. There was a good deal of comment on the way the professor’s tie was up near his ear and a general feeling that he probably needed looking after.
There was a notice at the door where we went out which said that the next lecture would be by Professor Floyd of the college department of botany on The Morphology of Gymnosperms. They say there will be a big attendance again.
Our Own Business Barometer
For Use in Stock Exchanges and Stock Yards
Recently, with the assistance of a group of experts, I have been going into the statistical forecast business.
I have been led to do this by noticing how popular this kind of thing has come to be. All over the country there are banks and trust companies, and statistical bureaus and college departments that send out surveys of business conditions and prophecies of what good business is going to do. In any good high school the senior commercial class is prepared to work out a chart showing what “world conditions” are going to be next month.
I note that this kind of literature is having a wonderful popularity. Many people are so busy nowadays that they have hardly time to read even the latest crime news, such as how the bob-eared bandit held up the Grand Central Station and got away with the entire Information Stand. But they can always find a few leisure moments for reading about the probable effect of the failure of the Siamese rice crop on the motor car industry.
In other words, this kind of literature has come to stay. There is henceforth a regular demand for a wide-eyed, clear-sighted survey of the business field. It is for this reason that I have been led to go into it and with the aid of experts am prepared to offer for the use of business men a brief survey of the prospects of the globe for next month.
We decided, naturally, to begin with the discussion of export wheat. It is the custom of all survey makers to start with the wheat situation and we follow their example. We find that advices from Argentine, from Turkestan and from Simcoe County, Ontario, indicate that the wheat situation is easier than it was. My experts place the Russian output at about half a billion poods while the Egyptian crop is not likely to fall below two hundred million quids. Add to this a Chinese autumn production of at least a million chunks and a first impression is one of exuberance if not hilarity.
But other factors are less reassuring.
There is a visible supply of 10,000,000 bushels of wheat in the elevators at the head of the Great Lakes and 10,000,000 bushels in transit to Liverpool, but on the other hand the Japanese consumption of wheat bread has fallen 3.6 per cent in the last month and the Chinese will hardly touch it.
Disturbed political conditions in the Argentine republic may result in the cessation of Argentine export but on the other hand improved conditions in Soviet Russia may result in the liberation of the Russian supply. The wheat crop in Hindoostan is said to be in serious danger of destruction from rust but as against that the wheat crop in Persia looks great. Speculative buying on the European exchanges may force the price up but on the other hand speculative selling may force it down. Our expert opinion therefore is that we don’t know. Wheat may go up in price; but it may not.
General business conditions, in our opinion, show distinct signs of improvement but they also show unmistakable signs of getting worse. There were 2,100 business failures reported last month in the United States and Canada. But in a way that’s nothing. There are a great many people who deserve to fail. Bank deposits, however, increased from $21,161,482,936.84 to $22,668,931,056.48, or something like that; we are speaking only from memory.
Sterling exchange in New York opened for the month at $4.84, rose sharply to $4.84 /32, reacted to $4.83 and then moved steadily up to $4.89. Why it did this we have been unable to find out.
Meantime the Brazilian revolution has focused financial attention on the milreis. As far as we can understand what the milreis did, it seems to have risen upwards, fallen down, lain flat, tried to get up, failed, raised itself again and then flopped. Our experts are not prepared to give any opinion as to what the milreis will do next. Some people think this is a good time to buy it, but if it was ours we should sell it. We wouldn’t want it round the place.
The movement of prices has been in various directions, some up, some down and some sideways. There was a five per cent drop in Portland cement, and a ten per cent fall in pig iron. But we ourselves are not using any just now and were more affected by the rise of 2 cents a gallon in gasoline which hit us hard and shortened our investigations by about ten miles a day.
During the same period under consideration there have been strikes, lockouts, earthquakes, cloudbursts, insurrections and other disturbing conditions beyond even the power of a senior commercial class to calculate.
Taking all these factors into consideration our conclusion upon the whole is that we don’t know what business is going to do next month, and we don’t believe that anyone else does. It is our humble opinion that a problem which contains among its factors the weather, earthquakes, snowstorms, revolutions, insurrections, labor, the tariff, the wishes and desires of one and three quarter billions of human beings and the legislation of over a thousand legislatures is a little beyond us.
We will go a little further. We incline to believe, and our experts agree with us (they are paid to), that all this business barometer, statistical forecast stuff means nothing more than the age-long desire of the human race for prophecies. There is no doubt people like to listen to a good prophecy. Children have their fortunes read in the leaves of tea-cups. Servant girls pay a quarter to have a Negress do it with a pack of cards. And cultivated people pay five dollars to get a divination from a Persian astrologer hailing from East Thirteenth Street, New York.
And so the business man has started up his own particular form of divination in his new statistical forecast. Our advice to our business clients (as we do not propose to stay in the forecast business) is this. If you want a really good forecast don’t bother with all the statistics and the index numbers and the averages. Go and get your fortune told in the good old-fashioned way in words of this sort:
“There is a fair woman coming into your life and there is also a dark woman. One of them will bring you great happiness but beware of the other. You are going to strike a great opportunity of getting rich; but you are also in danger of getting poor. You have nerve but you lack confidence, but if you will cherish your belief in yourself you will never know what a boob you really are. One dollar.”
That is the kind of forecast that has been going since the days of the Pharaohs and is still the best known. Stick to it.
My Pink Suit
A Study in the New Fashions for Men
This morning I put on my pink suit for the first time, and I must say it looked too cute for anything. I felt of course that it was an innovation and a great change, but I was glad to be in it.
I suppose everybody has been reading all about the new fashions for men and how over in London and Paris all the men are wearing suits of pink and sky blue and chrome yellow. All the London and Paris papers that I have seen say that the new suits are a great success and that the idea is all the rage. But, as I say, everybody knows about that and I don’t need to explain it. I only wanted to talk about my own suit.
I had it made out of pink georgette undershot with a deep magenta and crossed with an invisible slate blue so that the material shimmers in the light with different colors, and when I walk up and down in front of a long mirror (I bought the mirror at the same time as the suit), the colors run up and down my back in ripples of moving light. The magenta color seems to suit my figure, though several of my very best friends say that personally they think that they prefer the slate.
I had two or three men over in the morning to sit up in my room and watch me walk up and down in front of the glass. Of course, ordinarily at that time of the day they would be at their business, but I just telephoned over to them and told them that my new suit was such a darling that they simply must come over and see it. So they came over and we just sat around while I put on one part of the suit after another and showed it off in the long glass.
They all agreed that the color was lovely and they said they were just crazy to get a suit like mine. One said that he thought that for himself the color might be a little young and that for his age he would rather have a bottle green or a peacock blue — something a little older, but I told him that I was quite sure he could wear anything just as young as anybody. In fact, I know a man who is past sixty, who can wear pink for evening wear, and who looks just as young in it as anybody else would.
Perhaps I should explain, as I know a lot of my friends would like to know about it, just how I had my suit cut. The coat is made rather full at the chest and then brought in at the waist line and cut out again very full about the hips with gores and with ruffled insertions of pleated chiffon at the point where the back falls to the hips.
It has a ruching round the neck and is wattled around the collar with an accordion frill brought round just below the ears and then thrown back so as to show the back of the neck. Some of my friends thought that instead of a ruching they would rather have had a little frill of lace so cut as to show the throat. But I doubt whether, with my throat, this would be so good.
The buttons are in a large size of mother-of-pearl and are carried in a bold line edgeways from the shoulder to the waist with two more buttons larger still, behind at the place where the back dips in above the hips.
Everybody agreed that the buttons are very bold, but they thought that they would be quieter on the street than in the house.
The waistcoat is cut very simply and snugly so as to show the curve of the stomach as far as possible. It has just one little pink bow at the bottom, but beyond that it is quite plain. One or two of my friends thought that it might be a little too severe, but most of us agreed that though it might seem severe indoors it wouldn’t be so at all out of doors, especially on high ground.
The trousers are cut very snug around the line of the hips with gored insertion at each side so as to give free play for leaping or jumping and then are flared out to the knee where they are quite full and wide. They end, absolutely, only a little way below the knee and of course they need to be worn over clocked stockings or else I have to have my legs tattooed. They seem terribly short when I put them on, but everybody says that it is the length they are wearing in Paris and in London and that some of the men are even cutting off their trousers half way between the waistcoat and the knee.
I must say that I felt a little strange in my pink suit when I went out presently on the street in it. One of the men asked me to lunch with him, so I went out in my suit with just a little straw hat, half-size, and a bunch of violets in the lapel of my coat. I felt quite shy at first and quite different from my usual self, and I think I even blushed when some one came across to my table at lunch and told me he had never seen me look so well.
I went over to my office in the afternoon and the very first person who came in to do business with me said he was delighted with my suit, and so we sat and talked about it for a long time and he told me of an awfully good shirtmaker that he could recommend if I wanted to get some of the shirts they are wearing. He said that over in London they are all going in for fancy shirts to match the new suits and that the colors they wear are the most daring you can imagine. He told me that a friend of his, quite an elderly man, had just got back from the other side wearing a canary-colored shirt with pussy willow tassels round his neck, and that it was really quite becoming.
Other people came into my office later in the day and we did nothing but talk about the new styles and how delicious it is going to be for men to dress in all the colors they like to wear.
On my way home in the street car which was rather crowded, a man got up and gave me his seat, and of course I thanked him with a smile that showed all my teeth, but I didn’t speak to him because I wasn’t sure whether I ought to speak to strangers in my pink suit.
Well, when I got home I first stood and looked at myself in the long glass for quite a while. And then — I don’t know just why — I went and took off my new pink costume and put on the old gray suit that I had worn the day before. It was made, as far as I remember, about two and a half, or else four and a half, years ago.
It has no ruching, crocheting, or insertions in it, and it isn’t flared or gored or pleated, and it doesn’t sweep boldly round the hips or the neck or anywhere. It has a bulge here and there where I have sat on it or knelt in it or hung it on the electric light. The pockets of it stick out a good deal from having been filled up with pipes and tins of tobacco and fishing tackle. There is more or less ink on it, but nothing that really injures it for use.
Somehow I think I’ll go back to it.
Why I Left Our Social Workers Guild
We recently started in our town — as I suppose most people would have started in most towns — an organization called the Social Workers’ Guild. Our idea was that we would try to do good in the community around us. We would send children from the slums down to the sea, and bring children up from the sea to go to college. Wherever we find a poor widow living in a basement with a string of children and a new baby appearing every year, we would turn up on the threshold with a great basketful of toys. If the plumber was out of work and nearly in despair, just then one of our agents would drop a broken furnace in his lap. Anybody who has ever felt the fascination of that kind of thing, knows just what I mean.
And the best of it all was that all the cost of doing good was to be met by the proceeds of entertainments and amusements organized by the Guild, so that really we gave our money without knowing it and had all the fun thrown in.
I don’t want to say a single word against the general idea of such Social Guilds as ours. They are certainly very noble in intention. But as I have been led to terminate absolutely and forever my own membership of the Guild, I will explain the reason for my doing so by publishing my correspondence with Mr. J. Brazil Nut, the secretary of the league, or rather the series of letters sent by Mr. Brazil Nut to me.
Letter No. 1
Dear Sir,
I beg to inform you that the Committee of the Guild has discovered a very distressing case of a family who came here from Cyprus two years ago and are anxious to return home but are unable to do so. At the present time they are living in a small apartment of which we need only to say that not a single window faces the south, that there is no elevator although the place is three stories high, and that the condition of the front steps is deplorable and the door bell apparently permanently out of order. The landlord, we regret to say, stubbornly refuses to knock the place down.
The father of the family is a good workman and only too willing to work. His trade is that of a camel driver and hitherto he has been unable to find a camel. But he says that if money could be found he would go back to Cyprus where he knows of a camel.
Our Committee considering the case a deserving one, has decided to hold a dance in the Social Workers’ Hall on Saturday evening next. It is proposed to engage Bimbasti’s orchestra and, in view of the distressing nature of the case, to serve a light supper for which tables may be reserved by telephone. The price of the tickets, of which I am venturing to send you two, will be $10.00 each, the ticket carrying with it the privilege of eating supper, or of leaving without eating it, as may be preferred.
Yours very faithfully,
J. Brazil Nut
Secretary of the S.W.G.
Letter No. 2
